Cover photo: a clearcut adjacent to the Old Annapolis Nature Reserve. The forest to the right of the clearcut is now being proposed as a second clearcut, which would create a total clearcut area of roughly 150 acres. Photo courtesy Mike Lancaster. In her eloquent and thought-provoking 2014 book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Arundhati Roy […]
Dirty Dealing
Part 4: Message Control and the Northern Pulp Mill’s Cancer-Causing Air Emissions
Nova Scotia Lands, a provincial crown corporation charged with cleaning up Boat Harbour, played a role in silencing two Dalhousie University researchers whose work studied air pollution coming from the Northern Pulp mill, the Halifax Examiner has learned. In Part 3 of the Dirty Dealing series, I reported on the researchers’ 2017 ambient air study, which revealed […]
Thin skins at the Department of Natural Resources: Morning File, Wednesday, August 30, 2017
News 1. Bar Society says Lyle Howe should be disbarred, ordered to pay $500,000 “The bar society argues Howe should now suffer the ultimate legal punishment — not being allowed to practise the profession for which he trained — and also be shackled with a debt he may never be able to repay, in Catch-22 part […]
Biomass, Freedom of Information and the Silence of the DNR Company Men
Part 4: The Case of the Disappearing Forest Age Class Data
This article is Part 4 in Linda Pannozzo’s series: Biomass, Freedom of Information and the Silence of the DNR Company Men. The proceeding articles are: Part 1: Reporter Linda Pannozzo discovers just how hard provincial bureaucrats worked to ignore her questions. Part 2: An Open Letter to the FOIPOP Review Officer Part 3: What Happened When This […]
Muzzling the Forest Keepers
A Field Guide to Boreal Felt Lichen and DNR Message Control
Endangered boreal felt lichen. Photo courtesy Brad Toms. A redacted email exchange recently obtained through a Freedom of Information request revealed that on November 7, 2014, Allan Eddy, the associate deputy minister of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, was not happy with something he had just seen. Eddy was attending the annual science conference […]
Biomass, Freedom of Information and the Silence of the DNR Company Men
Part 3: What Happened When This Reporter Got Called Down to the Office
I’ll admit I was pretty intrigued this July when I was invited to a meeting at the Department of Natural Resources office in the heart of downtown Halifax. “I recognize that there have been challenges in providing you with the information you have requested, and that you have a number of questions for us that […]
Forest Tragedy
How the forest industry and compliant bureaucrats hijacked the public will
They were heady days. It was spring of 2008 and citizens started gathering in droves in community halls to talk about why the natural world mattered to them. A few months earlier Conservative Natural Resources Minister David Morse announced that Voluntary Planning would lead a year of independent public consultations on the province’s minerals, forests, […]